The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mullenweg: Wix violated copyright by making derived WordPress code proprietary
“What we often go to bat for and fight for, including with this company called Wix, is what they did was they took our code, and then the code they derived from it, so the modifications they met, were, they said were proprietary and secret to Wix. And so what w…”
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
CNET pioneered modern content management systems with hundreds of daily authors
“And so they invented a lot of, like, what we call CMS, or content management systems, because they were the first to really have hundreds of authors and thousands and thousands of posts and be publishing every day.”
Mullenweg joined CNET because it allowed him to retain code IP
“And the job I took, which was for CNET, I took it for a few reasons. First, they allowed me to retain the intellectual property to the code I was creating. So normally when you join a company like Google, you sign over the rights to everything you create there…”
Mullenweg: Employee job-hopping is the fault of companies, not workers
“I think that the people joke about, or they criticize that people jump between companies. There's no loyalty anymore. But I think that's the fault of the company, not of the people. It's that they're not treating people like they want them around for 20 years.”
Early WordPress beat enterprise CMS software purely on speed and ease
“And it's true, the software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways, but it was better in a way that mattered, which was like speed and ease of use.”
Google de-indexed WordPress.org after discovering hidden CSS spam links
“Then Google came in, and of course, they were pretty mad that this code had outsmarted their search engine. So they actually removed WordPress from Google.”
China represented up to a third of WordPress before being blocked
“The other thing was about a quarter or a third of our usage at the time was in China. And China decided that the Great Firewall would block WordPress.com.”
Every company acquired by Automattic eventually abandoned its physical office
“Usually what happens is when the company joins, we acquire them, they say, oh, we really need their office. We say, okay, we'll pay the rent, we'll keep it going, we'll keep the lease going. But then once they start to learn our way of working, fewer and fewer…”
An extended legal fight with Wix could have bankrupted Automattic
“When Wix did that, they had way more money than us. So a legal battle would have taken years, and even possibly bankrupted automatic, depending on how long it went.”
Automattic didn't ban political talk, only anonymous internal political posts
“And we never banned talking about politics. We did ban talking about some of it anonymously. So we said, some of these things, if you want to talk about this, that's fine, but do it under your own name.”
High-growth companies like Stripe and SpaceX no longer need IPOs
“Companies like Stripe, SpaceX they've gone to a hundred billion plus valuations as private companies, so you don't need to go public anymore.”
Mullenweg and Mike Little forked abandoned b2/cafelog code to create WordPress
“And so that's what Mike and I ended up doing, was we took the code from B two cafe log, kind of this abandoned code, and we did what an open source is called, we forked it, F-O-R-K. And start, use that as the base to start creating something new.”
Default backlinks in early WordPress installs boosted developers' search rankings
“Every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word Matt, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, Photomat.net, et cetera, is the number one site…”
Accessible open-source licensing depends fundamentally on respecting copyright law
“I'm a big believer in copyright. I choose to license my copyright in a way that's accessible to everyone, but, The core of that is a respect for copyright.”
Early tech blogs outcompeted CNET using faster software and personal writing
“Yeah, and they were moving faster, because the software was faster. They were writing more personally, so it was more interesting and fun to read, often in first person. They didn't know it at the time, but CNET was kind of being out-competed.”
Open-source contributors helped WordPress outpace superior competitors through faster iteration
“When WordPress started, it was worse than all the other software out there. It wasn't very good. It didn't have all the same features and everything like that. But because there were literally later hundreds of people working on it from all over the world, it …”
Automattic received a $200M buyout offer with only 20 employees
“Because we were only 15, 20 people at the time. I still owned well over half the company. And so this idea that the for-profit company that we'd been building for about two years was gonna be, had this offer. A very serious offer turned a million dollars was r…”
A Houston blogger named Christine coined the name 'WordPress'
“One of the bloggers named Christine thought of this name WordPress, and she called me. She was like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. There's this name, and the .org is available. You should go for it. And I just fell in love with it. So that's how we chose the…”
Original b2 creator officially crowned WordPress as its successor
“When he came back, he had seen that, like, oh, all these things blossomed out of this thing. And so he looked at all the different forks and very graciously sort of crowned WordPress the official continuation of B-II.”
CNET leadership rejected Mullenweg's pitch to build hosted WordPress internally
“I had gone to CNET and said, hey, WordPress is cool, but it's really complicated to set up. If we can make it easy, you just click a few buttons and you get a WordPress, I think that'd be really popular. Let's do that. And that was my pitch to CNET. And I even…”
Automattic built a razor-and-blades model with free WordPress and paid add-ons
“Part of the idea was that WordPress would always be free, and that's maybe the razor, but perhaps we could figure out some razor blades we could sell, some add-on services that would be really most useful to people who are using it more seriously, and then bus…”
Resold WordPress invites on eBay revealed monetization potential to founders
“And then these tickets started to sell on eBay. So people would get the free ticket, and then they would start to list it or sell it, and tickets were starting to sell for like, 9000 dollars, 120 dollars on eBay. And we were like, huh, maybe people will pay fo…”
A mid-2000s Google survey revealed WordPress powered 0.8% of the web
“Google had done this survey, published a survey of the internet. It was kind of like a statistical analysis of all the websites that were in the Google index and the code they used. And there was this part of the report that said, yeah, and then on .8% of webs…”
Mullenweg turned down a $200M buyout to keep his dream job
“And when I really thought about it, what I would most want to do. I would want to code every day. I'd want to travel the world and meet WordPress users all over the world. I'd want to make software that people used and do it with people I enjoyed working with.…”
Automattic raised $10M at a $200M valuation for secondary liquidity
“So what they did was they took the two hundred million dollars, and they said, okay, that'll be the valuation of the company. We'll do a new round of investment, but instead of putting in one million dollars, we're going to put in ten million dollars into the …”
An Automattic employee was arrested in Belarus for anti-regime blogging
“We had a colleague get arrested in Belarus because he was blogging and speaking out against the dictatorship there and things.”
Mullenweg's early paid project was a $500 website for his saxophone teacher
“He paid me, you know, 500 bucks, and I made him a website. But then, for no good reason, actually, I put forum software on his website, so there was, like, this forum where people could post, and you could ask him questions, but really, it just became, like, a…”
Mullenweg built a pre-Flickr photo website using open-source PHP script Gallery
“Well, I used some open source software called Gallery, and it was a PHP script that would allow pre-Flickr, pre-Facebook, pre-anything to post photos and have galleries online.”
All b2 forks except one eventually joined the WordPress project
“So all of the forks, except for one, joined up with WordPress.”
WordPress launched with only five or six core developers
“WordPress at the time of launch probably had like five or six main developers, but dozens and dozens of people would make like one small change or one little tweak to it.”
Mullenweg incorporated Automattic via LegalZoom, paying early staff $1,000 monthly
“I incorporated Automatic on a website like LegalZoom, like one of these, like you press a few buttons and it becomes a C Corp. So I incorporated the company, and yeah, just started to pay the first few people. You know, not a lot, like a thousand bucks a month…”
Spam blocker Akismet was Automattic's first commercial product
“The first commercial product I created Was called a kismet, named by my sister.”
Early WordPress spread via default 'Powered by WordPress' footer links
“One thing we did at the time was every website running WordPress, by default, in the template, it would say, powered by WordPress. And so, when you visit a website you liked, you would see this link and be like, oh, let me click on that.”